Format Decision: Traditional paper. Multimedia, while available, is difficult to obtain for a Scalar project.

Research question: How did the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act survive initial defeats and hold off five years of corporate lobbying until its passage in 1938? Framing the research question this way allows for exploring corporate interests and opposition to the FD&C Act against the backdrop of FDR’s New Deal. Simultaneously, it allows for exploring the effectiveness of relatively new female political power in lobbying for the bill. Narrowing the scope of the question to the years 1933-1938 allows for substantial exploration of the historical and social context of the period. By looking at the bill’s legislative journey, key figures and events are allowed to emerge and fill out the historical narrative.

Potential Thesis: Corporate opposition to the New Deal’s Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was overcome in part due to the emergent political power of women, vastly expanding the regulatory powers of the Food and Drug Administration and transforming how American food is policed, packaged, marketed, and consumed.

Sources

Anderson, Oscar E. The Health of a Nation: Harvey W. Wiley and the Fight for Pure Food.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Outline of Topics
• Corporate opposition to food safety
The bill’s initial defeat and subsequent defeats were due in large part to fierce lobbying by commercial groups. While its final form represented several compromises, it was defeat of corporate power in general and a demonstration of the power of a relatively new constituency.
• Women’s new found political voice
The bill’s sponsor, Senator Royal Copeland, was elected to the Senate with a large constituency of women. He sought to maintain their support throughout his career, and saw the bill as solidifying his political base in New York. Women provided him with political motivation to pass the bill. His motivation did not stem from support for FDR’s policies. In fact, he once primaried, against New Deal candidates. His motivation came from his disproportionally large female constituency.
• Food safety in contemporary popular writings
Several books on food safety and the need for new legislation were written by male and female authors and published during this time period (1933-1938). They documented existing food hazards and called for tougher regulations. They may have also been more popular with women than men, as food preparation may have been seen as a woman’s concern. For example, American Chamber of Horrors, by Ruth defrost Lamb, who would later join the FDR administration, is dedicated to eighteen women, all of whom occupied prominent positions in civil society.
• Leftism and the New Deal
Copeland was opposed to the New Deal in general and vigorously opposed the expansion of government under President Roosevelt. Rexford Tugwell, the bill’s first sponsor and Undersecretary of Agriculture, was a radical who believed that “business will logically be required to disappear.” Tugwell’s version of the bill was defeated immediately after Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. Some saw Copeland’s version, which was passed in 1938, as compromise, hoping instead for tougher regulations as a means for dismantling capitalism. Roosevelt, for his part, did not prioritize the bill because he did not see it as providing economic stimulus or banking controls, and thus did not view it as an essential part of his New Deal agenda. This was the political context of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.

If we’re to understand the conservative movement and the great backlash that has been a crucial part of American politics for the last three generations, origins matter because moral high ground matters. The standard origin story for conservatism, one that Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatism Won the Heart of America, advances, is that Roe v Wade galvanized what were then only fringe elements in germ stage and set them on a collision course for the White House and congressional majorities. Andrew Hartman, working in stark contradiction to Frank in A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, rightly discerns the racial animus in conservatism’s origin. The narrative of the great backlash changes dramatically when it’s recast as weaponized racial anxiety rather than a crusade to save helpless babies.

Frank uses his native Kansas as a stage for his investigation into why allegedly ordinary Americans would turn against the Democratic Party and vote against their own economic self-interest. Kansas, Franks asserts, is the heartland of America, and is a microcosm of a greater aliment, according to What’s the Matter with Kansas. And this shift in the heartland, from the bread and butter economics of the pro labor Democratic Party to the free market freefall of Republicanism can be attributed to abortion. And if abortion caused the switch in Kansas, his thesis goes, then it is responsible for the national upheaval.

Frank conjures much anecdotal evidence for this root cause. He begins with a story of his childhood friend and his father. The friend became enchanted with conservative thinkers such as William F. Buckley, and the unfettered free market policies of Milton Friedman, and became a “Reagan youth” (Frank 4). The father, on the other hand, had voted for George McGovern, and “would just shake his head,” when the son talked of the godly free market. But abortion would convert the father, Frank asserts. He writes, as a “devout Catholic, my friend’s dad was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures…”(Frank 4) The father went from McGovern to Newt Gingrich because the cries of the unborn compelled him.

For Frank, the culture war and the conservative backlash are only diversions, smoke and mirrors. The Republican establishment needed to bait the populace in order to conscript them into voting against their economic self-interest, and the culture war fulfilled this end. In short, What’s the Matter with Kansas serves as a cynic’s take on the last forty years of American politics, while trafficking in the equally cynical argument—prevalent in the pre Obama years—that racism is dead. Frank paid more attention to the fact the Catholic father was moved by abortion than his friend reading Buckley, a conservative thinker who, in the 1950s, gave racism intellectual garments, not unlike what Charles Murray did with his 1994 book, The Bell Curve. But Frank misses this clue.

Andrew Hartman, on the other hand, discerns the connection between normative America and white supremacy, how these perceptions and forces came together to forge the modern conservative movement. For Frank, Kansas was the heartland, the norm of American life, and this should have inoculated it from conservative, self-destructive, anti-labor rhetoric. Hartman, recognizing that these norms had been turned into racial markers, points out that normative was code for white.

Hartman begins his history of conservatism with Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism and legendary National Review editor. By 1972, newly reelected president Richard Nixon and Kristol had formed a friendship, according to Hartman. At a dinner, Kristol and Nixon reveled in their shared hatred of the New Left, which coincidently, not only called for the end of Nixon’s war in Vietnam, but for racial equality (Hartman 43). It was at this time Kristol became a full-fledged conservative, not only joining the American Enterprise Institute, but also taking up post at the Wall Street Journal’s column section. Fresh from establishing the Southern strategy—an electoral map that capitalized on Southern racial anxiety—Nixon solidified his relationship with the man who was the cornerstone of conservative thought.

It should be no surprise in this environment that when the Moynihan Report was made public during Nixon’s administration, its conclusions were argued to reinforce white superiority. The Moynihan Report documented the failing state of black communities, and suggested that the root cause was the inability of blacks to adequately socialize to white standards, and thus lived in poverty. Moynihan’s intentions were pure, but his error was to, in the words of Hartman, make the “assumption that assimilating to prescribed norms—to normative America—was the only path to equality” (Hartman 45). The black plight became a matter of culture, and in this reframing, white culture was superior. This would form the basis of conservative thought, and the pushback from the era’s Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts would fester, until abortion broke loose the infection. But the backlash was always based on white norms, called by different names, like middle American, or the heartland, and feed on racial anxiety. Abortion may have moved voters to Republicanism, but there were primed long before Roe v Wade.

Class is the chessboard, race is the chess piece. Class and race clash in negative economic environments, and in these negative environments, both concepts are essential to understanding US history. Asking which concept is more important glosses over the fact that class and race function differently in social history, that they operate on different social planes. To be sure, American racial history has been distinctly shaped by race, race discussion, and racism. But ignoring class, how citizens divide themselves and are divided, leaves the picture incomplete. Class and race must be taken together in one portrait, and their relationship needs explanation when discussing racial history.

Race is self-explanatory. While genetically insignificant, sight dominant humans have placed incredible importance on race, and Americans are by no means alone in their creation of the other when looking at their neighbors. But while race is clearly defined, elements of class are often overlooked. Class is more than just per capita income, literacy rates, a mortgage, and access to health care. Class is as social as it is economic, categories members assign themselves and others to, based on more than income. In this sense, when discussions of class take place and the sole focus is economics, observers miss much about the social force of class. The term middle class is spoken of as purely an income benchmark when it is so much more.

Complicating the discussion of race and class is the fact that both races in Thomas Sugrue’s account, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post War Detroit, sometimes reacted the same way in response to economic threats. Again, to be sure, the overwhelming bulk of housing discrimination in Detroit was systemic, officially sanctioned, and aimed at blacks. Whites were never red lined in Detroit’s suburbs, and blacks did not resist white busing. But there were times when blacks did discriminate, subtlety but effectively, against other blacks attempting to move into their upper class neighborhoods.

Sugrue records one such case. Most of Detroit’s black neighborhoods were in terrible shape, with limited housing, poor building code enforcement, disease and fire rampant, and absentee landlords who charged exorbitant rents. But black members of the Conant Gardens community were considerably better off, living up to the standard of their white, middle class counterparts, according to Sugrue. And they used the same subtle, discriminatory practices to ensure Conant Gardens stayed affluent. “Protective of their homes and investments, Conant Gardens residents, like their counterparts in white, middle-class neighborhoods throughout the city, used restrictive convents to bar multiple housing and other ‘undesirable uses’” (41). To be sure, race still distinguished whites from blacks in how effective each could create their own regimes:

In defense of their exclusive status, Conant Gardens residents staunchly (but unsuccessfully) opposed the construction of federally subsidized public housing at the nearby Sojourner Truth site in the early 1940s, forming an unlikely alliance with conservative white homeowners’ groups in the area (Ibid).

They were unsuccessful because race still mattered, and white superiority still existed, but it is fascinating to note that each race responded in the same manner to same economic threat—the erosion of home values. In the negative economic environment of dismal Detroit housing, blacks and whites, when placed in similar situations, reacted the same way, albeit with different results. Faced with threats to their share of the chessboard, each reacted similarly regardless of which chess piece threatened their position.

Class too, is complicated. It must be defined more broadly than mere income. No doubt income is a significant factor, as the Conant Gardens case shows, but it must include something else as well. How else to explain President Nixon’s grand reordering of the national political landscape in the election of 1972? Hostile towards unions, Nixon nonetheless won the union vote while destroying white working wages, defeating perhaps the most pro-union candidate in American history, George McGovern. And 1972 would mark the peak of white, male, working class pay, during Nixon’s second term (12).

Nixon was able to crush his opponent because he understood that class could be more than strict economics, that image and perception could trump annual income. Jefferson Cowie, writing in Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, describes Nixon’s vision. “Nixon grasped this basic sociology,” he writes, “and sought to recast the definition of ‘working class’ from economics to culture, from workplace and community to national pride” (165). Instead of investing in American workers and integration in an attempt to stabilize inequality, and strengthen the working class, Nixon offered a sort of cultural refuge:

Lacking both resources and the inclination to offer material betterment to the whole of American labor force, Nixon instead tried to offer ideological shelter to those white male workers and union members who felt themselves slipping through the widening cracks of the New Deal coalition (Ibid).

In this way, Nixon exposed class as capable of being conceived as more than income and material standing, but as a cultural artifice, a position on the chessboard to be defended.

]]>https://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/sugrue-cowie-paper/feed/0isaacmatsonWilkerson Drafthttps://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/wilkerson-draft/
https://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/wilkerson-draft/#commentsTue, 09 Feb 2016 18:02:06 +0000http://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/?p=16https://goo.gl/9v1CHu
]]>https://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/wilkerson-draft/feed/1isaacmatsonOther Suns: Pragmatism and Gender Roleshttps://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/other-suns-pragmatism-and-gender-roles/
https://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/other-suns-pragmatism-and-gender-roles/#respondTue, 02 Feb 2016 07:01:22 +0000http://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/?p=6More Other Suns: Pragmatism and Gender Roles]]>The coldness that George treats Ide Mae Gladney with while they labored as sharecroppers says much about gender roles in southern, black communities in the early twentieth century. To what extent did the legacy of slavery influence gender roles in their relationship? (49-50)

Why did W.E.B. DuBois have such a sharp disagreement with Rufus Clement if they both had the same goals, and what does this disagreement tell us about northern black intellectual thought?

]]>https://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/other-suns-pragmatism-and-gender-roles/feed/0isaacmatsonWarmth of Other Sunshttps://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/warmth-of-other-suns/
https://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/warmth-of-other-suns/#respondTue, 02 Feb 2016 06:41:27 +0000http://isaacmatson.wordpress.com/?p=2More Warmth of Other Suns]]>Part of Robert Foster’s story takes places in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended college at Morehouse, “a heavenly place,” and met Alice Clement, daughter of Atlanta University president Rufus Clement. Her family was well off. Wilkerson writes that the Clements lived in a mansion and that Mr. Clement had a driver. It would seem all this indicates blacks built a respectable middle class in Atlanta. Why did Foster still want to leave? What did the north have that the Clements and Atlanta did not?
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